Two young women arrive on a remote ranch and the cowboys are competing for their attention, "some with a foolish grin, some downcast and reserved, some swaggering in the natural pride of the lady's man." Hidden Water explores how American cowboys talked, thought, and behaved during the turn of the last century. Coolidge's cowboys include "the men that could rope, the men that could ride, the quitters, the blowhards, the rattleheads, the lazy, the crooked, the slow-witted." The novel was written more than a century ago, however, and the language is at times uncomfortable, and some would view it as racist. It is, however, a snapshot of how Americans wrote and thought 100 years ago.